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Hi d00med, thats interesting. As a total newbie, I'm struggling to understand what the kernel is, let alone if and how I should update it - thats kinda why I choose to go with the LTR version of Mint to start with. But maybe I'd better start learning (I seem to be on a VERY steep curve at the mo').

As an extra twist, I have found that if I change the desktop environment to MATE, I don't have any freezes running Firefox (although I have a number of other problems). Is that because MATE doesn't run 3D effects? Either way, it does seem that my problems are specific to the Cinnamon desktop in 3D. Would a kernel update have any impact on the Cinnamon environment?

fraplich wrote:Hi d00med, thats interesting. As a total newbie, I'm struggling to understand what the kernel is, let alone if and how I should update it - thats kinda why I choose to go with the LTR version of Mint to start with. But maybe I'd better start learning (I seem to be on a VERY steep curve at the mo').

As an extra twist, I have found that if I change the desktop environment to MATE, I don't have any freezes running Firefox (although I have a number of other problems). Is that because MATE doesn't run 3D effects? Either way, it does seem that my problems are specific to the Cinnamon desktop in 3D. Would a kernel update have any impact on the Cinnamon environment?

zerozero is far more qualified to answer those questions, but MATE is Gnome 2, while Cinnamon is Gnome 3. They're completely different architectures, and I'm pretty sure the Cinnamon GUI utilizes the GPU more than MATE.

It's not usually necessary to update the kernel, if your system is running fine.

Now I'm getting the freezing again, all day today, and it's definitely Firefox related. I'm pretty sure the first few times were caused by an excessive javascript menu on Amazon, but it locks up the OS and a hard reboot is needed.

we have here most probably 2 completely different issues (but with the same visible effect: the system freezing)

as for fraplich i still think that it's graphics card related (and the fact that it doesn't show neither in mate or in cinnamon2d kinda confirms this)extrapolating i would bet that xfce would play nice as well; what all those DEs have in common? a non-intensive openGL environment. it would be interesting to see how this combo (unsupported graphic card+fairly decent cpu) manage in kde: kwin is usually smart enough to fallback graciously.